"A photograph can do many things at once. I can be exploring culture or I can be making decisions about what street to photograph to give a taste of this town or this age. At the same time, I can explore the medium formally, explore how the structure of a picture may give a taste of an age, how perception works, and how a photograph plays with it.
I can also explore what you were saying, that sometimes the most mundane subject matter is the most telling because what gives the picture charge isn’t the cultural charge of the content as much as the awareness of the senses and the awareness of perception giving it a kind of visual resonance. It’s like those days or moments when maybe your mind gets a little quieter and space becomes more tangible, textures and colors become more vivid.
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A photograph can do many things at once. I can be exploring culture or I can be making decisions about what street to photograph to give a taste of this town or this age. At the same time, I can explore the medium formally, explore how the structure of a picture may give a taste of an age, how perception works, and how a photograph plays with it.
I can also explore what you were saying, that sometimes the most mundane subject matter is the most telling because what gives the picture charge isn’t the cultural charge of the content as much as the awareness of the senses and the awareness of perception giving it a kind of visual resonance. It’s like those days or moments when maybe your mind gets a little quieter and space becomes more tangible, textures and colors become more vivid.
Stephen Shore
This composition could be incredibly basic, almost like a snapshot, but it’s so interesting and inviting. Ten minutes later the street would look nothing like this, not as shiny or as dim. It’s a perfect moment. I love this photo.
Roger White: So if you realize you have an image in your head before you go to take a picture, the picture is going to be more considered. As you take more pictures does your way of formulating mental images change?
Stephen Shore: Yes. It can even change on the spot. This gets to something that may actually relate more to what we can call pre-visualization. If you go back in photographic literature past Ansel Adams and Minor White to Edward Weston, who gave them those terms, what he describes is something very similar to what in sports coaching is called imaging. And the idea behind it is: I’m a basketball player, and can spend hours a day practicing free throws, and at some point my muscles develop a kind of intelligence. They know the feel of the ball. But there’s so many muscles from my feet to the tips of my fingers involved in shooting a free-throw, if I tried to consciously control each of those muscles I couldn’t do it. But if I’d spent hours every day practicing so that I’d developed a kind of muscular knowledge, then if I had an image in my mind of the ball going through the hoop, that image will be a coordinating factor, it will coordinate all the muscular decisions. So in photography there’s a kind of visual education that’s gone on for years, seeing the world and taking a picture as a result. And doing this in different situations over and over again. Your visual muscles become educated and then the mental image you have of the picture will control your formal decisions, and that will create the result. For example look at me now, and try to be aware of the space that exists between us. And that I’m not quite as close as you may have thought I was. You can see your perceptions shift. Your sense of space shifts. And if you were to take a picture at that point, that picture might be slightly different. The framing might be slightly different. You might move back a bit. Or you might not even move back, you might move to the side. Who knows what it is, but you might do something slightly different that will reflect the difference in your mental image. So this is where the awareness of that mental image comes in. Just then you are aware of your mental image, so that you can see the difference in your perception as you became aware of space in a different way.
